


You Humans and Your Remedial Gender Constructs

by orphan_account



Category: The Thrilling Adventure Hour
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M, Transgender Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 15:33:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3574731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And then they'd talk, and the sky and the rocks and the plains would listen, and wouldn't care about the shouting and the messiness and the emotions they didn't have names for yet.</p><p>(Wherein Red is trans, at least by human standards.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Humans and Your Remedial Gender Constructs

"What a darling baby boy," someone said. The infant in question was too small, too young to understand the words, of course. Still, it could hear what it could not comprehend. Other words were spoken, though again it did not understand. There were lights, and sounds, and people, and emotions, and that was all.

\---

Later, there were shouts—screams. There were still lights: not the ever-changing colors of the sky now, but violent, red-orange flashes. Again, the baby did not understand. It began to cry.

It was alone. Time passed, of which it had no comprehension, and then there were others. There was hurried conversation, arguments, voices. And then things returned to how they had been. Lights. Sounds. People. Emotions.

The child grew, slowly. It grew into a small human with a thick mane of red-brown hair that no one even bothered to try and tame. No one would have known how. The child had no name, and this never seemed an issue, even after they'd been given one. No one much used it. They were called "the human child," when they were called anything. They grew up defined by their difference: they were human, all pale browns and reds, the color of the Martian soil. The others were blue, obvious, present. So even while they stood out, they were good at blending in.

The child forgot the people who had called them _darling_ and _boy_. Neither of those words had meaning here, anyways. They learned to speak formally, speak confidently, speak up. They learned how to shoot a bow, how to ride a horse, how to tell which plants were safe.

They had friends. Croach, for instance, and the others, the Martians about their age who didn't have too much of a problem with it when they forgot a designation or started yelling about something. But they had other friends, too—the blue-black sky, the dust-covered rocks, the endless red plains.

"Sky," they'd say after someone's pulled their hair. "Rocks," they'd say after they skinned their knee. "Plains," they'd say after they felt they'd utterly failed. And then they'd talk, and the sky and the rocks and the plains would listen, and wouldn't care about the shouting and the messiness and the emotions they didn't have names for yet.

So it was that G'rop N'go-goth stumbled into adolescence a reclusive, wild thing. And they stumbled into Croach, into romance. Because, sure, the Martian had been a friend, but this was different. This was special, even if it was expected, required. They didn't know the word _love_ , but if they did they would have called it that, in all their youthful ignorance.

\---

No one said anything when they started spending more and more time out on the plains, and less and less time in camp. When Croach did, finally, it was messy and harsh, at least for the human. After that, they stopped coming back to camp at all, apart from the occasional visit.

They were alone, and they liked it that way. They could hardly have said how long this went, riding the plains with nothing but their own emotions for company. It was probably a long time. They were happy, and free, and that was enough. They didn't know when people started calling them the Red Plains Rider.

They rather liked it.

\---

They'd known about the human town, of course. Everyone knew about it. But one day it just struck them what it actually meant when people spoke of it. _Humans_ ; that meant people like them. People who might not mind messy shouting quite so much. The settlement had always been a vague, forbidden place, but now—now it called to them more strongly than the plains had.

Yet they fought it. The very thought of just traipsing in there terrified them, shook them to their very core. They couldn't have said why.

The no-longer-child spent what must have been months working up the courage. And finally, they did it; they rode right into the town. They gathered stares and whispers as they moved, and they wondered if that was normal. They didn't think so, from what they'd read.

As they dismounted their horse, they wondered what their plan had been. They didn't know where to go, or who to talk to. But they didn't particularly care. They'd never seen so many humans in one place. There were more whispers, then not-whispers, and then, before the newcomer could have a chance to even wander far into the town, someone emerged from the thin crowd. He introduced himself as a Sparks Nevada, the marshal.

"What's your name, mister?" he asked.

They weren't quite sure why, but the first thing out of their mouth was, "The Red Plains Rider."

He raised an eyebrow (was that an emotional cue?), but said nothing. "And what're you doing in my town, Red?" They wondered vaguely about his use of possessive language.

"I thought it was time I visited," they said simply. They couldn't help but answer in short, honest sentences. Their years of cultural conditioning were kicking back in.

After more prompting, they started to explain in full, about being raised by Martians. But when they started to tell their story, he stopped them, and insisted they finish sitting down. He took them to the saloon ("Can I get you anything?" the barkeep asked, and they just stared blankly), where the two of them sat, and the ex-Martian talked, and the now-marshal listened.

They didn't tell him everything. Years of solitude had left them with that much desire for privacy. But it surprised them how much of their life seemed story-worthy to this person, this human. And if they were being honest, they liked the attention. They'd never thought of themself as lonely, but now they wondered how they'd ever survived without people. No, they realized uneasily, without humans.

They spent a lot of their time in town, from there on out. They came to trust Sparks Nevada, much to their surprise. They began to adjust to the differing cultural norms, and they dared to think, for a glowing moment, that they'd found a place where they could belong.

People still stared. They tried their best to ignore it. They knew they must look unusual, with their Martian clothes and snarled hair. They didn't bother with changing, although they wondered about it. Maybe it would make people stop staring; maybe they wanted that.

 

\---

The Red Plains Rider was in the midst of a casual conversation with Sparks, when they happened to mention the visitor who'd passed through Mars earlier that day. "He was interesting," they said.

Nevada muttered something.

"What?"

"'She'," the marshal corrected.

Then the conversation progressed, turning between Red's reluctant questioning and Nevada's amused answers, and it gradually it became more and more apparent how little they had known. They knew about gendered pronouns, of course, but the extent to which it affected the culture, their daily lives seemed unreasonable. Other people in the saloon started interjecting their own, rushed answers (why hadn't they thought to have this conversation in private?), full of laughter and what Red really hoped wasn't spite.

They were a boy?

What did that mean, exactly? Their hair—what did their hair have to do with anything? Why should their body dictate something so major about them? Why couldn't they—they stopped asking questions, eventually. It was weird, but then again, it was human. Hadn't that been what they wanted?

\---

That night, they cut their hair short. And they kept it that way. Red was a boy, and he was going to act like one.

It was around this same time that Red's relationship with Sparks changed, when he felt himself falling in love for a second time. So he didn't notice the stares that followed whenever he was with him. He was used to staring. Later, Sparks had to sit them down and explain. It was gender again.

He helped Nevada with his marshal duties, often. There was something exhilarating about it; it just felt right. He was happy. Almost.

He tried to talk to Sparks about it, about how it still felt so wrong to use these words to describe himself, how he was beginning to hate the body that had trapped him in them. Sparks didn't get it. But it was as he spoke this aloud that he realized, it wasn't only gender, this ridiculous cultural construct no one else seemed to think worth the time of questioning, the bothered him. It was this _particular_ gender.

He tried to be okay with it. He really did! But it never stopped feeling somehow wrong. There were other things, too, of course, not just gender; social norms and language quirks that made him want to scream. But that was different.

His relationship with Sparks was quickly deteriorating. When had he started living in town, not just visiting?

He went to ask the plains. "Sky, rocks, plains," he whispered, and felt silly for doing it, for continuing this habit that to him was so inherently linked with childhood. "I don't know what to do."

He left. The goodbye was messy, as messy as last time. But he became once again, truly, the Red Plains Rider, alone in the desert. Helped people, when he could. The skills he'd learned, both Martian and the human, were good for something after all. Sparks Nevada may have been a marshal, but they realized that his power didn't reach more than a mile out of town.

Red was never alone, really. She had the sky and the rocks and the plains. And she was never what anyone else said she was really. Never a Martian, a human, a boy. Just a person. A woman, if she had to be.

She was okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer that I am cis, so if you feel like something's off about how I represented her gender here feel free to call me out on it.
> 
> On an entirely different note, this is the first thing I've posted on AO3. So that's cool.


End file.
